Post-Association fruitage

Post-Association fruitage

My husband and I are traveling in the Southwest. For the last couple of days we were in Zion National Park. As I was happily clambering over some rocks on a hike to an overview in Zion, I was reminded of a wonderful healing I had very early on in my study of Christian Science.

When I was a child, I never walked anywhere if I could run instead. Unfortunately, I also fell down a lot, resulting in a lot of scraped knees. By my teens I had, according to the family doctor, damaged the cartilage and whatnot inside my knees so that they wouldn’t always work quite right. By the time I was thirty, my knees creaked—truly, people could hear them as I walked. I was working in the hemophilia center of a major hospital complex and had just begun attending a Christian Science church with my husband. One day an orthopedic surgeon who heard me walking in the hall said that he would fix my knees as soon as he got back from his two-week vacation. That’s when I knew it was time to get serious.

I went home that evening and (having no idea of how one was supposed to pray) said, “OK, God, we have two weeks. What do I need to learn here?” I learned how to use concordances, and I learned how to think about sentences and paragraphs in Mrs. Eddy’s writings in a specific context. I also learned how to accept the healings in the Bible as actual—not metaphors, not mind over matter, but genuine changes of the physical condition.

Before the two weeks were up, my knees were creak-free. A follow-up exam proved that all the cartilage, bones, and whatever were just the way they were supposed to be. And within a few months our circumstances had changed so that I was no longer working with doctors every day.

Now, over thirty years later, I can hike for miles over all sorts of terrain. I had no way of knowing back then that my husband and I would eventually find so much joy in hiking, sometimes staying in lodges, sometimes in our little orange tent. It gives me an opportunity to renew my gratitude. So often, when I see some beautiful view, I see it as a reflection of God’s infinite creation, a new idea, a manifestation of Mind’s all-knowing that I have never seen before, and I feel very blessed to have experienced it.

The past year has included so many healings for me—a problem with blurred vision in one eye, persistent pain in an arm, a claim of allergies, and a wonderful healing of a very strained relationship with my younger daughter. I have written to you before about my sense of living in God’s universe, in His house. But that last healing especially has given me a different sense of where I am. During all the months that my daughter was avoiding contact or conversation with me, I kept her close in my heart, loving and cherishing her. When she started calling again, I just kept loving her. I didn’t ask her what had happened; I didn’t give reality to the error that we were ever apart.

Lately, when I think about where I am, I’ve been feeling held very close in the heart of Love, with a really strong sense of God’s presence.